Most societies, at least in this century, handle the problem of national defense by having a large, well-armed, permanent military force, run by a centralized government, funded by taxation, and often (though not always) manned by conscription. Is this a solution that a free nation can or should follow?
Tag: monopoly
Things to Keep in Mind During the Health Care Debate
Politicians, of course, can declare a right to medical care, but those are mere words. What counts is what happens after the declaration. Since a system in which everyone could have, on demand, all the medical care they wanted at no cost would be unsustainable, the so-called right to medical care necessarily translates into the power of politicians and bureaucrats to set the terms under which medical services and products may be provided and received.
Anarchy and Islam
I’ve met Muslims of every school of anarchist thought from anarcho-socialists to national-anarchists. Prominent among them are Hakim Bay’s “ontological anarchism” and Yakoub Islam’s “post-colonial anarcho-pacifism” but this is my story.
The Gruesome Reality of Statism
It is nearly impossible to calculate the amount of harm for which the state is responsible. Sure, you can theoretically count the dollars stolen, the people kidnapped and locked in state cages, and the individuals killed directly, but what is much more difficult to grasp is the scale of the harm caused indirectly by statism.
Anarchism as Constitutionalism
Trying to refute anarchism by pointing to undesirable instances of anarchy is about as bad an argument as trying to refute Bidinotto’s advocacy of government by pointing to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Whether a state is horrendous or decent depends in large part on its constitutional structure; whether an anarchic society is horrendous or decent likewise depends on its constitutional structure.
The Learning Revolution versus The State
The world is in the midst of a learning revolution, yet those who wish to continue using education as a means of control do not want to acknowledge it. You can now learn more in an hour—online, for free—than you can in a full day on a college campus. Information has become superabundant and essentially free.
Pseudo-Skeptics Fail Basic Skepticism
Criticism of my work seems to be immune from the skeptic process. The mental conditioning of statism appears to be so strong that those who claim to be skeptics forget these principles and rely on logical fallacies to support their preconceived conclusions. I thought it would be instructive to demonstrate how some pseudo-skeptics have criticized my work.
If Men Were Angels
Although I admit that the outcome in a stateless society will be bad, because not only are people not angels, but many of them are irredeemably vicious in the extreme, I conjecture that the outcome in a society under a state will be worse, indeed much worse, because, first, the most vicious people in society will tend to gain control of the state and, second, by virtue of this control over the state’s powerful engines of death and destruction, they will wreak vastly more harm than they ever could have caused outside the state.
Is the Non-Aggression Principle Self-Negating? You Decide!
A person named Jared emailed me out of the blue about a week ago with the following letter. It contains a request for feedback followed by an argument that the Non-Aggression Principle as made popular by Murray Rothbard was self-negating on the grounds that the creation of private property is an act of aggression. What ensued were several letters back and forth in which we both flesh out the other’s argument and offer our critique. In the end we understood each other better, but alas no consensus was reach.
What A Constitution Is And Is Not
What is a constitution? People talk about and hear about this word when debating politics or watching mainstream media. It is common knowledge that the United States is host to the U.S. Constitution and that it is the “supreme law of the land.” But what does it mean?